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the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, Rachel Dane, spokesperson for Harvard, wrote in an email to ICT that the hair in the Woodbury collection does not fall under the federal regulation.
Shannon O’Loughlin, Choctaw, attorney and chief executive for the Association on American Indian Affairs, disagrees.
“Under NAGPRA regulations, human remains are defined as the remains of a body of a person of Native American ancestry,” O’Loughlin said. “Although the law doesn’t apply to portions of remains shed naturally or freely given, children didn’t have agency to consent to the hair collecting; they weren’t at boarding schools of their own free will.”
O’Loughlin also criticized Harvard’s stated intentions of collaborating with tribes in determining how the collection will be handled. She noted a process is already in place under NAGPRA that clearly outlines how institutions are to collaborate with tribes in repatriating or transferring human remains and other cultural items to appropriate parties.
“There is little transparency,” she said. “I don’t hear Harvard say they are going to work with tribes and determine what tribes want to do. Instead they announce they’re going to start a whole other process and do it themselves.”
The Northern Arapaho Business Council issued a statement Nov. 21 demanding that Harvard and the Peabody Museum return hair samples improperly taken from Native children, including some from the Northern Arapaho Tribe in Wyoming.
“It is impossible to undo atrocities committed against Native children ripped away from their families as part of the federal government’s forced boarding program,” the tribe said in a statement, “but Peabody Museum can and must cease its role in this abuse by returning to appropriate tribes any hair samples taken from these children.”
The statement continued, “It’s long past time that museums, universities and other institutions apologize for their objectification of Native people and culture and return to rightful owners the sacred artifacts stolen from Indian Country.”
Boarding schools as laboratories
In 2018, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada on behalf of thousands of Indigenous children used as research subjects between the 1930s and 1950s in that country’s Indian residential school system. The suit also accused the government of “discriminatory and inadequate” medical care at Indian health institutions.
Ian Mosby, assistant professor at Toronto’s Ryerson University, has published research showing numerous examples of Indigenous children being used as subjects of experiments to test tuberculosis vaccines. Mosby also found that government agencies conducted nutritional experiments in which children were systematically starved in order to provide a baseline reading in testing the impact of vitamin and mineral supplements and enriched flours and milk. Dental services were also withheld in some schools to provide test data.
The Canadian lawsuit also includes other medical experiments performed on Indigenous populations without their consent, including skin grafting among the Inuit in the 1960s and 1970s, birth control and forced sterilization of women from the 1920s to the 1970s.
So far, there are only a handful of verified examples of similar research and testing have been found on Native populations here in the U.S.
In 1976, a Government Accountability Office investigation found Native children in government boarding schools were used as subjects in researching trachoma, an eye disease, without parental consent. The investigation, ordered by U.S. Sen. James Abourezk, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, also showed that more than 3,000 women were sterilized at Indian Health Service facilities without adequate consent.
As the investigation into U.S. boarding school history moves forward, many predict more examples of government sanctioned research and experimentation will come to light.
Native people have long been the subject of research influenced by colonialism, race-science or eugenics, including Samuel Morton’s infamous 19th century Cranial Collection consisting of the skulls of around 1,300 people from around the world. According to Smithsonian Magazine, there are an estimated 500,000 Native American remains and nearly 1 million associated funerary objects currently held in U.S. museums.
“We weren’t considered to be human to white settlers,” said Lajimodiere. “Our bodies were just part of the fauna, available for exploitation.”
The museum shared information about the collection with leadership at the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, and Lajimodiere and Azure report that they recognize several of the names listed among the Woodbury collection.
“I can say that the museum has been extremely helpful and willing to do whatever we feel is right to get the remains
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back to the family,” Azure said. “There is a little bit of a silver lining to this; it’s bringing people together to talk about not only the significance of the hair but also finding a way to bring it back to the community in a good way.”
Azure noted, however, that tribal leadership has been unprepared for the mental health challenges associated with growing awareness about the boarding school era.
“Some survivors have opted not to attend our events and commemorations,” Azure said. “They find it too triggering.”
Where are the resources?
The lack of mental health resources for boarding school survivors and their descendants continues to be a problem.
“I wonder how many other institutions are digging around in their dark basements and will find similar things in the future,” said Lajimodiere.
Parker, with the boarding school coalition, noted that although the coalition can direct survivors toward mental health resources, there aren’t nearly enough. She noted that according to a 2018 GAO study, the federal government allocates twice as much money per Medicaid recipient as it does for Indian Health Service patients.
“In Canada they have the residential school healing line; I think that’s something we need here as well,” she said.
Parker and the coalition are also pushing for passage of a federal boarding school truth and healing bill, which would create a commission to investigate the history of schools and provide trauma-informed resources for survivors and descendants.
“The government and institutions like Harvard should bear responsibility for the harm inflicted at boarding schools,” she said.
Stacey Montooth, Walker River Paiute Nation, executive director of the state of Nevada Indian Commission, agreed.
“How many times do we have to be traumatized by news like this?” she asked during an interview with ICT.
Montooth’s office is located in the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City, Nevada. The federal school operated from 1890 to 1980 serving children primarily from Nevada’s Great Basin tribes — Washoes, Paiutes and Shoshones.
According to its website, the mission of the organization, which opened in 2020, is to tell the story of the thousands of American Indian children who were educated at Stewart. The campus is also a hub for Native art, lectures and other public programming and educational activities.
Montooth expressed surprise that Harvard did not reach out to the center and museum about the collection of hair. Stewart Indian School is listed among the collection locations and many of Nevada’s tribes are among sources listed for the hair samples. She heard about the collection from a colleague in another state.
“Harvard needs to open up their checkbook and not only pay for, but help us identify, the very best psychologists, counselors and others who are best equipped to help our people,” Montooth said.
ICT asked Harvard officials if the university had any plans to provide such funding or services.
“We do not have a comment,” was the reply. l
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Mary Annette Pember, a citizen of the Red Cliff Ojibwe tribe, is a national correspondent for ICT. Follow Pembler at @mapember.
Journal digital editor Kimberly Wear contributed to this report.
A version of this story was first published by Indian Country Today.
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Following a trend seen across the state, region and country, local hospitals are nearly at capacity amid a surge in respiratory illnesses that’s being dubbed a “tridemic” or “tripledemic” by some.
“With the circulation of multiple respiratory illnesses, such as RSV, influenza and COVID-19, we, like the rest of Northern California, are experiencing a significant increase in visits to our emergency department, most notably pediatric patients,” Providence St. Joseph Hospital spokesperson Christian Hill told the Journal by email. “In some cases in order to ensure patients receive the level of care that meets their specific needs, they are transferred to an appropriate care setting out of the area.”
During a press briefing before Thanksgiving, California Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly warned that COVID transmission was increasing throughout the state, noting that a hospital in San Diego had begun using an overflow tent to treat patients outside amid a surge in flu cases.
The surge has grown so severe in some areas, like Fresno, Madera and Tulare counties, that officials instituted an “assess and refer” policy, giving first responders the authority to decide whether a patient is transported to the hospital as officials urge residents to avoid calling an ambulance unless experiencing a “life or limb-threatening emergency.”
Throughout the Pacific Northwest and in patches across the country, emergent pediatric care has been stretched to the brink, as hospitals have struggled to keep up with a steep increase in children sick with respiratory illnesses. Tony Woodward, the medical director of emergency medicine at Seattle Children’s Hospital, recently told reporters the hospital’s ER is at full capacity almost constantly and can reach up to 300 percent of capacity in the evenings.
According to a dashboard maintained by USA Today’s The Californian, about 70 percent of local hospital beds are currently full, including 62 percent of intensive care beds. (It’s unclear if the dashboard accounts for staffing limitations or just looks at physical capacity.) According to the dashboard, 1,405 residents have sought emergency care over the past seven days, including 65 who were confirmed to have COVID-19.
Hill said in order to maintain capacity, the hospital is strongly encouraging residents to “get your seasonal flu shot, latest
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COVID booster, as well as practicing good hygiene, and staying home from school, work or holidays parties when sick.”
He stressed, however, that residents in need of service should not delay seeking timely medical care, as the hospital continues to “provide exceptional care.”
Mad River Community Hospital Chief Nursing Officer Jason Photo by Mark Larson Orlandi said staffing It was a fantastic mix of artistry and pyrotechnics as artist rather than space Duane Flatmo’s flaming El Pulpo Magnifico lit up Arts Alive in remains the limiting Eureka’s Old Town on Dec. 3. See more at northcoastjournal. factor of providing com. POSTED 12.06.22 patient care locally. Typically, he said, the hospital will transfer patients out of area when more people need care than the local hospital system can provide but, with hospitals throughout the state seeing surges in respiratory patients, he said the hospital is “preparing for the possibility of not being able to transfer patients out of the area.” — Thadeus Greenson POSTED 12.01.22
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